Classes

Course Description

This seminar investigates the nexus of music, poetry, cosmology, and iconography in medieval Arabo-Persian culture from, roughly, the Sāmānids (ninth/tenth century) to the Safavids (sixteenth/seventeenth century). Topics include the valuation of music and musicians in Persian court culture (as filtered through the lenses of court poetry, illuminated manuscripts, and travelogues), musical metaphor and ritual in medieval Persian Sufism, and the development of "spiritual audition" (samā'/sema) in its expansion across Central Asia. These topics will be situated within the broader framework of contemporaneous debates about the morality of listening within Islam. No knowledge of Arabic or Persian required.